The Great Lover (17 page)

Lacking a God, the cult is going to create its own. Deuteronôme explains that casting a spell is about something getting denser and denser, acquiring over time one coat of reality on top of another, acquiring solidity all the time “... until there can be no other possibility but that it
must be
.” There is always a physical element: making gestures precedes even the manufacture of tools as a way of making something ideal real.

In an emotional voice, odd for him, Ptarmagant says, “The magician is the grin through the fog.”

“
Magic...” Deuteronôme continues in his relentless way, “— The moment you are dealing with formulas, with a prescription, with a regulation, you walk away from magic. The spell is too subtle to be caught in a jingle. It is subtle that it can only be brought about in the improvisation of a true magician — un sorcier. Like the bones, the cards, or the dice, the elements are flung into confusion, and then, as the different configurations of elements present themselves to the magician, he — with lightning speed, of mind and body — seizes upon the right constellation for the purpose. He will pull out the only constellation that can be used for that purpose.”

The map explains: The God of the subway cult is to be created in a huge prayer, extended in time, space, number of persons involved, and modes of address. This prayer is coordinated from four axial centers which regulate the operation of its sub-cells. These cells, known as “axons,” are carefully segregated from each other in order to minimize overlap, so that any redundancy is only coincidental. Each “joint” endows a number of axons. There is no center, and no single object of concentration. Even Ptarmagant is only a participant, although he did invent the method. In his work at Meadowlab, Ptarmagant assessed the empirical evidence of divine operations and determined that, while we encounter a gesture here, an assembly there, the divinity is never all there. Divinity, as a hexeity, a mode of existing, is always a matter of being a complete fragment, indicating a total whole of which it is impossible to conceive. Since a divine being is too “enormous” to be apprehended in its entirety by any human observer, the creation of a God is not possible where that God is planned out and described in any complete way. So the God must be created in whole fragments, and in such a way that no participant in the creative work is in a position to see even all of the prayer at once. Only one being, the divinity itself — it is hoped — will apprehend the prayer all at once.

So, the invented God must have different names, its worship take a variety of different forms, often contradictory. A God must exceed the capacity of any single human mind in order to be a medium between minds.

As Ptarmagant speaks, cobwebs flutter and dust sighs into the air over an abandoned platform, hermetically sealed. In the process of assembly, the cult’s God will gather all those fugitive scraps of ghostly energy, an ad hoc ritual here, a gesture there, a candle flame... It will take time, and there are certain counter-forces involved, an inert mass of misappropriated spirit, a deeply-entrenched and fortified metaphysical idolatry.

On a bench on the platform the ragged shirtless man smoking a shapeless cigarette. The moment he is alone his eyes flick alive. He puts the butt in his lips, moves to the tiled wall and carves three vertical lines and a crescent into the grime with the tip of a long finger, and raps with his knuckle the four compass points on the wall around the figure in counterclockwise order starting at the top. He pours a libation of beer then returns to his seat. This is only one sign out of many used throughout the system to designate cult coordination points. Bottles of liquor or packs of cigarettes are stashed behind fuseboxes and ventilation gratings as offerings. Images painted in darkness are burned on the tracks, and seething baskets of captured cockroaches are smashed in hydraulic presses as a sacrifice. In some places the practice of compulsive wagering becomes epidemic. There is usually no clearly represented stake: more like —
if
I can get to the front of the car before the doors close —
if
I can hold my breath while bounding up this entire flight of stairs two at a time —
if
I can disentangle my book from this bag before the music ends —
if
no one else boards this elevator. The stakes were offerings, the winnings spirited away to accumulate
someplace else
.

The far ends of the platforms are extended, projecting out into the tunnels and lined with penny arcade peeper machines; they take only the thick coins of heavy gold I make myself, a tree embossed on one side and on the reverse a segment of the map. These movieola devices relay impressionistic and vague messages between cultists. These are not really directions so much as they are magical indicators meant to stimulate spiritual projections of certain kinds. This one, with a bronze medallion on the front depicting a centaur copulating with a faun, shows a dark high-contrast film of grey dusk over a heath. In the foreground are trees so dim they seem like coagulated shadows pulsating in the wind, their eerily soft-looking branches stroke the air.

*

Rushing sweeping impetuous speed of the train, communicating its frightening motion to me. I am rigid, sitting by the glass. Human energy is turning my head, like a confusion of smells — Now,
there he is!
The sewerman lumbering out of the tunnel mouth. I move swiftly, taking the passage under the tracks. He’s gone; but I see he has only just left, returned to the tunnels, after leaving a bottle of transparent fluid in a tiny niche below a ventilation grate. There — I see the shape of his jagged head and fluffy collar there against a blue light far away.

I follow him into a maze of ramps and stairs, where I see him now high, now low. He appears and disappears. I catch sight of his upturned face on a ramp overhead, and the now tiled edge of a passageway draws in the black hump of his back like fluted white lips. Yearning billows through me, making jelly out of me, and I sway against the wall in confusion — bright terror of being abandoned cuts through this nearly at once, and I hasten to find him again.

He knows he’s being followed. He drops through the traps of bathroom doors, bundles himself into phone booths, inserts himself between token machines, idles in place, crossing and recrossing vast floors. He’s a dark blot in the unbroken flow of bodies right to left oozing in and out among them. A harsh squeal of brakes coasts through the station, and he sidles up the steps to the street.

I stay with him — he flashes along a hill top, slipping in and out of trees as he did people a moment before. Here’s a paved what-do-you-call-it with empty seats, hexagonal flagstones, a granite rail from which to look down on the drenched park, black trees against saturated green, cold as death!

I still haven’t managed to lose my pursuer, so I stop and wait for him. Here he comes. The Prosthetic Libido stands a pace away from me, dressed in a yellow slicker with the hood up and a rain hat mashed down over that, lean trouser legs taper to his ankles, his feet are wedged into ill-fitting satin slippers nearly colorless with grime. Agony twists in his shining face, his lips tremble, his brow knotted, tears welling in his enormous eyes powerful with enchantment. He walks up and flings his arms around my neck, clutches me and presses his whole body against me. He trembles so violently I am nearly thrown from my feet.

“
Help me!” he sobs into my ear. His voice is so beautiful I gasp aloud.

The Prosthetic Libido cinches my lapels, his small fists bolted hard in a grip like iron knots. Withdrawing his coral mouth from my ear, he slides his face along my cheek, leaving a cool trail of perfumed grease. He brushes my lips with his and for a moment our breath, which is one breath, mingles again in the narrow gap our mouths make. The Prosthetic Libido’s eyes open. I turn away my head, my eyes suddenly feel dead my dead gaze drops through the air from my eyes like a stream of lead pylons.

The Prosthetic Libido shivers, the sensation enters me through my coat. In a throbbing voice he says, “Hulferde
died!
”

CHAPTER FIVE

Let me tell you about the Prosthetic Libido: in the dim mass crowding the streets of downbeaten and tense faces, his features gleam bright and clear with powerful, unadulterated feeling — he steps off the curb into the crosswalk into the light of the sun, and suddenly the light in reflecting puddles is dazzling, the street blazes with blinding flakes of burning light. Everything in your field of vision burns stiffens and rings like wind chimes around him, in all of literature there is no character more beautiful.

I watch a wheel in articulation of his neck that spins slows down and speeds up again. When the Prosthetic Libido talks, his lips click against each other, and the hinge of his jaw whirrs softly. Hair tossing in the wind as dusk gathers against his profile, the vitreous fluid of his sob story spills from him like treacle. He turns to me and speaks words directly into my eyes, then turns away to stare at the ground, or the horizon, memory pawing and sporting with him. When he turns from me, I feel as though a sticky contact is tearing, as though he were glued to me with tacky melted candy cracking in long crisp strings. When he turns his face toward me, I feel a force like a bubble of magnetic repulsion that breaks instantly over me and spellbinds me as he takes all my weight into himself through his eyes and mouth and holds me in his story.

The result of his full activation exhilarated Hulferde like amphetamine. With new energy and clarity he was able to handle twice as many projects. He locked the Prosthetic Libido in an empty, windowless room in the basement, and forgot about him. The Prosthetic Libido lay there in the dark, in an astonishment that lasted for a very long time. He remembers getting up off the floor many times and walking around the room, which was not that much farther across than the span of his arms, stretching his limbs, kicking and spinning in the dark, ricocheting off the walls, luxuriating in the elasticity and strength of his limbs. His discovery of the light switch, which set fire to the single bulb in the ceiling, occasioned great excitement. Revelling in the light, he switched it off for the pleasure of watching it return, and enjoyed the effortless exertion of power over it. Then, by its light, he discovered his own body, but his caresses began to awaken an acute yearning in him to be touched by another person. He had repeatedly tried the doorknob, but with only a pretty vague idea of its function. The door now became the most distinct presence in his mind as he learned to see it as a barrier. He tried, with patience and steadily mounting ardor, to open it, but Hulferde had seen to it that the door was reinforced, and had made it as near to a bank vault’s in strength as he could. Then the Prosthetic Libido began to cry out for help — and this went on forever, so that crying out became like a kind of sleep. When he next awoke, his cries had been transformed into language.

He cried, and his frustrated desire began to inflict an agony of pain on him that he was helpless to resist, or ignore, and he started to scream and drum on the door with his fists, driving himself in a frenzy to make as much noise as possible. Again there was a kind of sleep in which this screaming and pounding extended into a new and unfamiliar species of infinite time — when the door opened he dropped backwards onto his ass, as shocked and amazed as someone stricken awake out of the deepest point of a dream.

Hulferde stood fuming in the doorway with a poker in his hand. He rushed in and began beating the Prosthetic Libido wildly with it, cursing him and demanding that he be silent. Evidently the Prosthetic Libido’s screaming had been interfering with Hulferde’s work. The Prosthetic Libido kicked and snapped against the floor under Hulferde’s blows, shrieking and jerking like a hooked fish, making an uncoordinated, ineffective effort to avoid the blows. Hulferde beat him until he’d exhausted both his strength and his store of abuse, then, wearily turning to go, he shut off the light and left the Prosthetic Libido weeping bitterly on the floor.

He spent his days then lying on his side, staring mournfully at the ground, darkness gathering each day in his raw new mind. The spontaneously orderly development that had been underway in him since he first became conscious was now thrown entirely into confusion. His behavior was spasmodic; he would play with the light, then shut it off and throw himself violently against the floor again and again for hours. Leaping as high as the ceiling and crashing down limp against the cement floor. Unconsciously his hands would move to give himself what small allowance of pleasure was available to him and then instantly would come violent convulsions and unreasoning panic.

The desire he was constructed to house could well up in him at any time, and he came to dread the relentless upsurging of this yearning because he had no power to contain it. He would begin to moan and drive his head against the floor trying to damage himself or knock himself out, but of course he is indestructible. As the desire became more intense he would begin to experience intolerable pain, and then he would be irresistibly compelled to scream and to howl, and to batter at the door. Hulferde would come, sooner or later, flinging open the door and knocking him down, and then he would kick and thrash him with a baseball bat he had purchased just for this purpose. Although they terrified him, through this devastation of pain and humiliation the Prosthetic Libido still learned to feel a kind of despairing gratitude to Hulferde for these beatings; at least this was touching. As long as he endured them, he would not be alone.

“
Why are you so cruel to me?” Those were his first words, each one perfectly formed, standing alone in a sentence broken into pronounced pauses.